It's nice how this chapter is such a smooth transition back into the minds of the hobbits. Tolkien is prepping us for our reintroduction to Frodo and Sam in the next book; he eases us into it with the point of view shifting the Merry and Pippin here. After all the time being spent with Aragorn and Friends, who ostensibly know most of what is going on (Aragorn more so than Gimli, of course), it's strange to be back in the heads of the hobbits, who know so little about what is happening and what will be expected of them. In a way, they are just "rag-tag," following Gandalf's tailcoats; it may sting a little, but Merry at least recognizes that very clearly. Pippin is of course more pragmatic about it: "Our whole life for months has been one long meddling in the affairs of wizards." In a way, it's good to be back with you, hobbits. Especially now that the annoying jolly duo of Merry and Pippin is about to be split up for a while.
Pippin and Merry get quite a bit of character development in these few pages, with their separate takes on their situation and Pippin's focus on the "glass ball" that turns out to be quite a serious matter indeed. I wonder if Merry would have been so quick to fall under the spell of the palantír; Merry is just so much more pragmatic and sensible, it seems doubtful to me that the allure of the unknown would have been able to snare him as easily as it did Pippin. Pippin was always the hobbit excited about "adventures," while Merry embarked on the quest out of solidarity with his cousin Frodo. As Gandalf notes at the end of the chapter, "You knew you were behaving wrongly and foolishly; and you told yourself so, though you did not listen." But Pippin's impulsiveness turns out to be for the benefit of the good guys; what would have happened if Gandalf had been the first to gaze into the palantír?
In any case, Pippin gets a heck of a sendoff at the end of the chapter, with one of Tolkien's most beautiful conclusory lines in the entire trilogy: "As he fell slowly into sleep, Pippin had a strange feeling: he and Gandalf were still as stones, seated upon the statute of a running horse, while the world rolled away beneath his feet with a great noise of wind." Things are moving fast now; Saruman has been dealt with and now the true enemy is upon them. It's time to deal with Sauron face to face.
And does the Lord of all evil come off particularly well in this chapter? No, not really, in my estimation. Instead of taking the time to extract any really useful information from Pippin, when he has him under his control, he just jumps to some hasty conclusions and tortures him for fun for a little bit before releasing him. Sauron's undoing will be what we stated before -- he is so sure that the Ring will be used against him by one of the Great or Wise that he never considers the peril approaching his own land. He is so confident that he knows exactly how Pippin and the palantír fit into things that he doesn't bother to confirm his idea; he just proceeds, arrogantly believing that his assumptions are gospel truth. Sauron, for all his power, does not seem very self-aware. He has no concept of his own limitations; his own blind spots. Maybe that's because he is alone at the pinnacle of his own success? He has no confidants, no trusted advisors. He is absolute, and thus he is solitary. So the very existance of absolute power is its own undoing, in Tolkien's portrayal of the Dark Lord, because he cannot possibly be aware of his own weaknesses without others to point them out to him.
We'll learn more and more about Sauron's tactics and points of view in the coming books. I'm interested in analyzing further where he goes wrong and what we can learn from it. And I'm also excited to rejoin my preferred characters within the more contemplative, but more emotionally and thematically expansive Book IV.
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