"The Muster of Rohan" - Ben's Thoughts

The cardinal sin of this chapter is not that it's bad, like "Grey Company" -- it's that it's boring.

What happens: The company arrives at Dunharrow; Merry hears an old legend about the Paths of the Dead, that doesn't add anything to what we learned in the last chapter; the errand-rider arrives and asks Theoden to come to Minas Tirith, which we already knew was his plan; Merry is not allowed to come with; and a mysterious rider lets Merry ride with him to come anyway.

So essentially, not very much. There's a song thrown in, that isn't an "in-narrative" song like many from "Fellowship" (i.e. something far better fit in an appendix, or footnote, or something other than the text itself, but heaven forbid Tolkien excise one of his songs), and a legend with a spooky maybe statue-maybe really old guy, that ties in with the skeleton we saw in the last chapter. But other than that, there's a lot of talking, they travel from one place to another place, more talking, then more traveling begins.

Part of me is sympathetic because of the Gordian knot that Tolkien's plotting has presented him with: he doesn't want to leave Merry in the lurch, and how else can he get Merry to Minas Tirith without exiling him, and Theoden and Eowyn, from the narrative for several chapters? My thought, for what it's worth, is that this chapter should have been trimmed down to maybe a page, and inserted in "The Ride of the Rohirrim" as an extended flashback, with Merry contemplating "the trip so far", particularly his first contact with Eowyn as Dernhelm. I think that would have moved the book along at a better clip, with only one boring chapter in between the two more thematically and narratively rich Minas Tirith chapters.

I will say two nice things about the chapter, however. One: Tolkien once again manages to convey his sense of history as palimpsest -- the Rohirrim has settled into their lands, after the previous peoples were swept away by the tides of history. Their songs, tales, their very reason for being, has vanished in the mists of time. Merry gets a sense of that loss as he regards the Pukel-men statues: "[N]o power or terror was left in [the statues]; but Merry gazed at them with wonder and a feeling almost of pity, as they loomed up mournfully in the dusk." This theme is one that he continually circles back to: civilizations crumble; entropy abounds; no-one, mortal or elf-kind, can escape from it. It is one of the overarching themes of LOTR, and one that resonates powerfully with the reader.

Two: Tolkien's prose shines through; his descriptions and landscapes remain utterly masterful. What a sense of scope and wonder he evokes, in describing the White Mountains and Merry's descent into the valley:

It was a skyless world, in which his eye, through dim gulfs of shadowy air, saw only ever-mounting slopes, great walls of stone behind great walls, and frowning precipices wreathed with mist. He sat for a moment half dreaming, listening to the noise of water, the whisper of dark trees, the crack of stone, and the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound. He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.

Of course, Merry's a bit of a wimp. I'm not sure if he's truly reflecting Tolkien's mindset, but this sense of wanting to escape the majesty, the enormity, of the natural world is nothing that resonates with me. I would be right at home in the vastness of Middle-earth.