Again I turn in comparison to Jackson's film, because "Helm's Deep" is ever so bland. Where is the emotion, the danger, the tension, that Jackson managed to eke out of these sparse pages? Assuredly valid complaints can be made about the length of the battle scenes in the film. Yes, it dragged on too long. But in the film you can feel the bone-weariness of the soldiers who are defending this fortress, and the near-despair of Theoden that leads him to what amounts to a suicidal charge from the keep to face the armies of Saruman head-on.
It's also interesting that here, the charge doesn't seem that suicidal at all. The king and Aragorn manage to sweep the armies before them, to the point where they are "cowering" between the king's forces and the wood of Hurons that has crept up behind the orcs during the night. The text makes it seem like the orcs are all but finished even before their "final doom", Gandalf and Erkenbrand (an unintentionally hilarious name; small wonder Jackson dropped it from the film -- although he did keep the also ridiculous "Gamling") are icing on the cake, so to speak, of the orcs' destruction. They don't even have to get the heads a-rollin' -- the orcs in their terror flee into the woods where, we are told in an over-dramatic pronouncement, "from that shadow none ever came again." Sigh. I love Tolkien's prose, but perhaps the battle scene was too much for him.
Or perhaps I'm overlooking the fact that this battle chapter seems devoid of emotion because Tolkien had actually been part of a number of battles in World War I and couldn't bring himself to translate what he felt about the experience to the text. Despite Aragorn and Theoden's bleak predictions about how sour the battle is going, you just don't feel it from reading the chapter; in fact, Tolkien has his characters wisecracking throughout and even includes an interlude where Aragorn has a chat with some nasty rude orcs. The gloss perhaps hints at Tolkien's distaste for combat. You won't find drawn-out descriptions about exactly how Aragorn or Gimli hacked orcs to pieces, nor anything about spurting blood or screaming wounded. It's all quickly swept over in an oddly detached way.
It'll be interesting to see how I perceive the battle of the Pellenor Fields, found in Book 5, this time around. I will note that Tolkien skipped over the Battle of the Five Armies (in The Hobbit) entirely (whereas Jackson spent the better part of 2 hours depicting it in his latest film, a true bastardization of The Hobbit if there ever was one. More on that of course if we ever get to those films). High fantasy novels, of which Tolkien is credited as a founding father, don't get very gory or bloody, but in this day and age it makes one pause when all of that is just sped over with barely the bat of an eyelash.
Or perhaps it's just because Saruman's orc army is just "The Dragon" to the ultimate "Big Bad" figure in this book -- Saruman himself. We'll get to him eventually. Of course, as Gandalf pointed out, Saruman, too, is just another stepping stone towards fighting with Mordor. I can just imagine Sauron observing this battle with interest, and knowing that the fate of Gondor might be sealed prematurely by Saruman's victory. Sadly for him, Saruman is utterly trounced, both here and on the home front, as we'll see in the next chapter.
Yeah, I had the same impression that, not just due to his WWI trench experiences, but also from the then-recent Battle of Britain, Tolkien had had his fill of combat and butchery, and hence forward had no stomach for recounting it, let alone romanticizing it.
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