Once again I'm confronted with the difficulty that Tolkien obviously had in plotting Book V. He wants Merry to join the fracas before the gates of Minas Tirith, and he wants to make sure that his carefully-laid timeline adds up from chapter to chapter, perspective to perspective. The trouble is that he displays a strange reluctance to abandon a particular character for a long period of time.
I maintain that the best way to solve this problem would have been to have just one, rather than two, chapters about the Rohirrim and their journey to Minas Tirith (essentially, to combine "Muster" and "Ride") into one extended chapter. Tolkien deftly handled extended journey sequences in previous books; "The Great River" comes to mind from Book II, where the narration alternated between several POVs quite smoothly and major episodes were highlighted as the Fellowship journeyed down the Anduin River. Why something like that could not have been employed here is beyond me.
The frustrating thing about this chapter is that it ends with a bang. The Rohirrim's sneaky entry past the Rammas and into the Pellenor, combined with the tense pause before their final triumphant charge, is excellent stuff. It's just the lead-up was, as Jacob irately points out, totally unnecessary.
In the end, I agree with his assessment that the Wild Men could have been excised from the narrative and it would have been all for the better. I will, however, attempt to address the Wild Men's place among Tolkien's thematic elements. In the last several chapters -- really, ever since Frodo's meeting with Faramir in Book IV -- the Professor has been highlighting his hierarchy of Men, from the pinnacle (Numenoreans) down to the most base (the uncomfortably stereotyped Haradrim and other vassals of Sauron). Generally, there's a clear curve from the heights to the depths; force of will, art, literature, supernatural ability, and the like are at their peak with the Men of the West and at their nadir with the Men of the East. The question is, where do the Wild Men fit in? On the one hand, they embody the kind of Men present in Middle-earth before the Numenoreans returned to the land in the Second Age -- primitives. They are the distant kin of the Dead, now rallied by Aragorn at the Stone of Erech, who betrayed Gondor thousands of years ago. Yet here, the Wild Men are united with the Rohirrim in their opposition of Sauron, even if they're not willing to descend from the hills and actually engage in outright warfare.
While the stereotypes are fairly reprehensible, I do think that Tolkien was mildly challenging his own smooth ethnic model by inserting a good, righteous -- but primitive -- culture into the mix. I would like to think he's reminding himself that there's no such thing as an absolute; truth and goodness is found in every culture and walk of life. Unfortunately, I can't complain about Jacob's criticism of the execution of that idea, nor about his complaint that it simply isn't necessary or helpful at this point in the narrative.
Take the chapter for what it's worth -- which is the final sequence -- and we'll move on to what I remember being far better: the big battle.
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