Grima and the Army of Isengard

[davem]

I'm reminded of this interchange between Joseph Campbell & Bill Moyers in the TV series Power of Myth:

CAMPBELL: There's another emotion associated with art, which is not of the beautiful but of the sublime. What we call monsters can be experienced as sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain them. An immense expanse of space is sublime. The Buddhists know how to achieve this effect in situating their temples, which are often up on high hills. For example, some of the temple gardens in Japan are designed so that you will first be experiencing close-in, intimate arrangements. Meanwhile, you're climbing, until suddenly you break past a screen and an expanse of horizon opens out, and somehow, with this diminishment of your own ego, your consciousness expands to an experience of the sublime.
Another mode of the sublime is of prodigious energy, force, and power. I've known a number of people who were in Central Europe during the Anglo-American saturation bombings of their cities - and several have described this inhuman experience as not only terrible but in a measure sublime.

MOYERS: I once interviewed a veteran of the Second World War. I talked to him about his experience at the Battle of the Bulge, in that bitter winter when the surprise German assault was about to succeed. I said, "As you look back on it, what was it?" And he said, "It was sublime."

I'm not sure we can attribute one or other simple emotion to Grima here. I think he actually had a kind of transcendent experience, of pure power, which simply overwhelmed him emotionally. He was suddenly confronted with his own insignificance in the face of power which he could not comprehend. It was beyond logic. He felt absolute awe & his emotions swept him away.