Let's Read Tolkien 54: The Passage of the Marshes

Gollum moved quickly, with his head and neck thrust forward, often using his hands as well as his feet.

Gollum leads Frodo and Sam down through the hills and into the Dead Marshes. They move by night and rest by day, both to avoid detection and to suit Gollum's hatred of the sun. In the marshes, not only is their route and footing uncertain, but they're haunted by strange corpse-lights and apparitions of dead bodies below the surface of the water: the dead from the great battles of the previous war against Sauron. There's a moment of horror when a flying Ring-wraith passes near them, and Frodo begins to feel the malign will of Sauron more strongly as they near Mordor.

Beyond the marshes, the hobbits and Gollum arrive in a desolate wasteland at the foot of the Mountains of Shadow. As they rest, Sam overhears Gollum having an argument with himself, on whether to betray the hobbits or not. A sinister "she" is mentioned. The debate seems to come to no conclusion, and at dusk, Frodo commands Gollum to take them to Morannon, the Black Gate of Mordor.

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The previous time Tolkien's war experience broke into the story directly was way back in the Hobbit, when Bard led a very anachronistic anti-aircraft defense of Lake-town against Smaug. Here, it's the titular marshes that are a memory of the bogs of the Somme. As Tolkien puts it (Letters, 226):

Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.

You'll notice they never quote that last sentence! For what it's worth, I agree with Tolkien: there's not a lot of either world war in the Lord of the Rings; Tolkien's ideas of war are far more Beowulf than Band of Brothers. But it really is difficult to read this chapter and not think of the mud of the Western Front. I was strongly reminded of Pat Barker's Regeneration.

From the Dead Marshes, the hobbits move on to an unmistakably modern industrial landscape.

Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.

It's not entirely clear what kind of industry could have produced this kind of devastation. Some of its features seem very modern, like the oily sump at the bottom of the hole where Gollum and the hobbits camp. But Tolkien was, if anything, a committed anti-modernist, so the association of industrial waste and mining slag with evil will, for him, have been a natural one. It was no accident that Tolkien named the sin of opposing God's will the Machine. In a sense, as the hobbits travel toward Mordor, they're traveling through Tolkien's personal psychogeography.

Finally, at the end of the chapter, we have Gollum's debate with himself. In many ways, it mirrors Frodo's struggle on Amon Hen: Sméagol, like Frodo, feels the malign influence of Sauron, and while some of him wants to fight it, his fallen will can't overcome the corruption of the Ring. Unlike Frodo, Sméagol doesn't get a divine intervention.

Finally, on a purely practical note: how are Frodo and Sam's clothes not completely falling apart by now? Do hobbits wear denim?

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Next time: poetry.