Chapter 3: The Muster of Rohan
Yeesh, Ben wasn't kidding when he called these next few chapters a slog. I have hardly any memories of Book V, and for good reason, I increasingly find. Chapters that contain killer lines like "So we come to it in the end...the great battle of our time, in which many things shall pass away" should fill one with excitement, euphoria, anticipation and awe; instead, I'm filled with mere relief that this whole exhausting drag will finally come to a close.
Who knows, maybe all this dragging is performative; as we discussed clear back in the Battle of Helm's Deep, there is in reality nothing euphoric or exciting about war. The main war-time memories of most folks, civilian and military alike, is of it all just being one big monotonous slog. For Tolkien, a veteran of WWI and a survivor of WWII, "adventure" was perhaps the last thing he associated with war--he probably couldn't have written an exciting battle scene even if he'd wanted to, which he clearly didn't.
Moreover, this whole subplot of Merry and Eowyn-in-drag not wanting to be left behind for the final battle either needed to have been introduced far earlier or cut altogether, because right now neither character is developed enough, nor are the readers sufficiently invested in them, for their predicament to carry much resonance. (I have the same complaint about the Oathbreakers, recall).
Compared to the far greater arcs about the destruction of the Ring and the Return of the King, Merry's mopiness before Theoden is borderline asinine. Much like the Palantir with Pippin, the whole situation just feels like a mere plot device to get Merry into the thick of the action, with some pathos tacked-on to make it less obvious. Moreover, these various plot-devices feel unnecessary: Tolkien got Merry and Pippin to the Siege of Orthanc without hardly any melodramatics whatsoever. Tolkien is starting to rush, and it shows.
A friend of mine once ranted that she believed most trilogies would be far better served as duologies; that most authors, in their quest for that magical, marketable "3", end up resorting to a whole lot of unnecessary padding, which undercuts the impact of their endings. LoTR may be Exhibit A, the progenitor of both the modern Trilogy and of its worst excesses. I'm still excited for some of the thrilling scenes to come, but I think Ben may be right, that Return of the King is overall less than the sum of its parts. Here's hoping we're wrong.
Ben's Thoughts (11/21/16)
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.
Eric's Thoughts (11/21/16)
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. If Lord of the Rings started with Return of the King, I would guess no one would ever read on.
As Ben and Jacob have noted, this chapter, among others before it, are obviously transitional chapters bridging the characters from the battle of pelennor fields to where they were before. To refresh everyone on what happened here, the chapter involves moving the riders towards Minas Tirith, Merry eating with the King, Merry almost being left behind, and Merry being picked up by a rider called Dernhelm.
Sadly, like the chapters that come before it, something is lacking that makes the prose lack an "oomph" factor. My initial thought is that it lacks a compelling POV character to drive at least an emotional arc while the external conflict itself is non-existent. Merry, not developed as a character, seems to be a poor choice to drive the narrative.
That's not to say that there aren't a few moments that are interesting. For me the most compelling part is when a messenger shows up from Minas Tirith and begs for aid from Théoden. King Théoden rises to the challenge and summons the army -- wait for it -- which (disappointingly) is only 6,000 strong.
And that goes to another problem. Something I found really odd is how few men the forces of good seem to have -- yet they manage to put up a fierce resistence to the supposedly numberless hordes of Sauron. Perhaps that just goes to human tenacity, but personally I think it's a plot whole. It almost suggests that Sauron doesn't have that much either, say like 30,000-50,000 troops at best. That's nothing to sneer at, but in a modern world of over 5 billion people, Sauron would have significant trouble conquering even Alaska (population 736,732). If anything, the low amount of "Team Gandalf" forces seems to suggest the Dark Lord himself is not really that powerful. (Especially since that paltry force breaks Sauron's forces in Pelennor.)
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